Moved by the Motion (Wu Tsang & boychild, Patrick Belaga, Josh Johnson, Asma Maroof)

Sudden Rise

  • Performance
  • Dance
English /  45 Min.
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“Sudden Rise” is the latest piece of work from Moved by the Motion, the performance group founded by Wu Tsang and boychild. The performance is co-created with their collaborators, cellist Patrick Belaga, dancer Josh Johnson, electronic musician Asma Maroof, and poet Fred Moten. Drawn from a collection of fragments excerpted from the text “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune” written with Moten, the cross-boundary performance interweaves the words and actions of pivotal 20th century civil rights activists, poets, essayists, including Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. Du Bois alongside Jimi Hendrix’s lyrics, Hannah Arendt’s musings, and Oskar Becker’s “mantic” phenomenology. A collage of words, filmic images, movements, and sounds, the performance is set as an exquisite corpse (the Surrealist chance-based game of consequences), which references 18th century "phantasmagoria" theater using proto-projections and scrims to echo stories of trauma and resistance across, through, and out of time. boychild and Johnson perform a duet in multiplication live and as pre-recorded images, reimagining the early days of cinema when projections shared the stage with theatrical performers. Belaga’s cello and piano intertwines with the electronic repetition of looped voices manipulated by Maroof, and the chiaroscuro lighting of baroque portraiture is diffused against digital architectures, spatial grids, and test patterns that continually re-form time and perspective on stage. 

Cast

Direction & Performance: Wu Tsang / Co-direction & Performance: Tosh Basco / Performance: Josh Johnson / Cello: Patrick Belago / Electronics: Asma Maroof / Lightning: Elena Samoray / Video: Anthony Valdez

Dates

Past
  • German premiere
    Fri 28.6.2019, 20:30 / HAU1
  • Sat 29.6.2019, 20:30 / HAU1

Credits

A commission by EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (USA).

Location

HAU1
Stresemannstr. 29, 10963 Berlin

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